Entrails of a Beautiful Woman
(Bijo no harawata) (1986)
Directed by Kazuo 'Gaira' Komizu
Artistic Value:
Entertainment Value:

Synopsis
A young woman is captured and gang raped by several yakuza she tracked down after learning that they had sold her sister into sexual slavery in Africa. During their assault upon the girl, these men give her a powerful drug, 'angel rain,' that causes her to become sexually stimulated. Nevertheless, she afterwards manages to escape and make her way to a clinic. There, she relates what happened to her to a psychologist before committing suicide. The psychologist, horrified by the dead woman's story, resolves to avenge her. She seduces and hypnotizes one of the yakuza, getting him to attack his fellows, but they then force him to identify her. The gangsters proceed to kidnap the psychologist, savagely rape her, and give her a dose of angel rain. Unfortunately, the drug kills her. When one of the yakuza tries to dispose of her body, however, the woman comes back to life, though with the ability to transform herself into a skinless monster with superhuman strength and an enormous, fanged, prehensile penis. She promptly puts her new abilities to use by slaughtering those who had just victimized her.

Analysis
Kazuo 'Gaira' Komizu's Entrails of a Beautiful Woman is a grisly, disgusting, prurient, and consistently entertaining movie.

The film is amongst the sleaziest I have ever seen. It is absolutely packed with one lurid sex scene after another. Two of the longest of these depict groups of men raping some screaming young woman and are wildly vicious. Even those that portray consensual sexual activities, such as that in which the psychologist seduces one of the yakuza so that she can hypnotize him and that in which one gangster's drug addled moll fellates another yakuza in order to get a fix from him, are harsh and salacious. All of this said, I have to admit that Entrails of a Beautiful Woman is actually fairly sexy. It has a brutal sensuality that can be captivating.

What is more, the film is exploding with the most vile brutality. Not only are there scenes depicting rapes, as has already been mentioned, but various yakuza are shown fighting, beating, stabbing, torturing, and even dismembering one another. Such sequences are not, however, the movie's best. The concluding portion of Entrails of a Beautiful Woman is unbelievable. The transformed heroine engages in a series of insanely violent acts of retribution, every one of which is something to watch. She twists one man into a pretzel, pops the head of another (with her hands) as though it were a pimple, and thrusts a third man's head into her anus, thereby suffocating him. In her original female form, she has sex with a yakuza, throttles him, and then continues to have sex with the man's carcass. Having finished with that individual, the psychologist, now, once again, in her skinless, male form, visits the drug addicted moll (upon whom she had earlier been compelled to perform cunnilingus), who promptly fellates her visitor. After such foreplay, the fiend has sexual intercourse with her intended victim, shoving her giant phallus so deep into the woman that the end of the thing tears out of her stomach. The film's ending is incredibly gruesome.

Lastly, I should note that although the director does revel in his presentations of sex and gore, he still does provide an engaging narrative. The viewer, though thrilled and chagrined by the savagery with which he is presented, is not likely to be intrigued only by such things. The narrative actually conjures up a sense of the nastiness of the yakuza villains and of the dangers faced and the sufferings endured by the female protagonists. Consequently, the viewer will, almost certainly, find himself caught up in their worlds so that the horrors he sees affect him far more than they would have had they been inflicted upon persons with whom he was not involved.

Entrails of a Beautiful Woman really is a repulsive film, but it is never a boring one.

Review by Keith Allen

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